The Cardinal
Page 1
E LA SUA VOLONTATE È NOSTRA PACE
—THE PARADISO, Canto III
Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
—Lesson First: A CATECHISM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
Copyright
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION
IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM
COPYRIGHT MCMXLIX, MCML BY HEARST MAGAZINES, INC.
COPYRIGHT MCML, BY HENRY MORTON ROBINSON
Lyrics from I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier, page 31, words by Alfred Bryan, music by Al Piantadosi. Copyright 1915. Copyright Renewal 1943, Leo Feist, Inc. Used by special permission Copyright Proprietor.
Lyrics from When You’re Away, pages 121, 126, 127, by Victor Herbert, from “The Only Girl.” Copyrighted 1914 by M. Witmark & Sons. Reprinted by permission.
Lyrics from I Miss You Most Of All, page 241, by Joe McCarthy. Music by James V. Monaco. Copyright 1914 by Broadway Music Corp. Reprinted by permission
ISBN 978-1-46830-643-9
FOR
Cecile and Joseph Forman
Contents
E La Sua Volontate È Nostra Pace
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Foreword
Prologue
Book One: The Curate
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Book Two: The Rector
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Book Three: The Touch of Purple
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Book Four: Seventh Station
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Book Five: The Crozier
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Book Six: The Red Hat
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Epilogue
About the Author
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
A novelist may, if he chooses, disclaim all resemblance between the characters in his story and actual persons living or dead. While I am prepared to make such disclaimers for many of the people in The Cardinal, I cannot pretend that Stephen Fermoyle is wholly a product of my imagination. It would be truer, I think, to say that he is a composite of all the priests I have ever known—and particularly those priests who left mysterious imprints of their sacred office on my youth.
To these indelible traces, deeper and fresher now than when they were first made, I owe whatever insight I may have into the priestly life. Upon such seemingly frail foundations, buttressed by conscious study and mature observation, I have sought to build the many-chambered temple of Stephen Fermoyle’s character. Some may think the attempt presumptuous. “How,” it will be asked, “dare a layman approach the altar as celebrant, enter the confessional as a looser of sins, wield the crozier, and don the red hat reserved for Princes of the Church?” Granting that the sacerdotal soul is a secret place, I feel, nevertheless, that the ecclesiastic life offers the novelist a genuine challenge in a much neglected field.
The reader may be interested to know that I am, and always have been, a Roman Catholic. Whether or not I am a “good” Catholic is surely a matter between me and my Creator. I never aspired to be a priest. As a writer, I was struck long ago by wonder and awe at the priest’s function. In The Cardinal I have attempted to express these feelings by describing a gifted but very human priest fulfilling his destiny as a consecrated mediator between God and man.
Some readers may find my hero too-improbably virtuous; others may complain that in certain episodes he forgets, momentarily, his divine calling. With no desire to disarm such criticism beforehand, I ask only that Stephen Fermoyle be judged (as all men must) not on the testimony of single incidents, but on the manifest intention of his entire life.
The Cardinal is neither propaganda for nor against the Church. Most emphatically it is not a theological treatise or a handbook to history. It is a purely fictional tale, a story to be read as a narrative woven by a watcher of our world, who believes—in spite of evils fearfully apparent—that faith, hope, and compassion animate men of good will everywhere.
HENRY MORTON ROBINSON
WOODSTOCK, NEW YORK
JANUARY 19, 1950.
Prologue
On the High Seas
LIKE MANY A FLORENTINE before him, Captain Gaetano Orselli, master of the luxury-liner Vesuvio, was inordinately fond of jewelry. As a younger man he had not wholly resisted the temptation to overload his person—especially his hands—with costly stones; but now in his meridian forties a purer taste was asserting itself. The gem for its own sake had become a canon with Captain Orselli. He contented himself with wearing a single ring at a time, and exercised his really superb sense of ritual by selecting precisely the right stone for the occasion.
Tonight Captain Orselli was choosing his ring with particular care. In a few minutes he would make his appearance on the bridge of the Vesuvio to point out sidereal wonders—stars, planets, constellations—to a small group of saloon passengers gathered there by special invitation. He hovered over his ring case, hesitating between a cabochon emerald and a Burmese ruby. The Captain owned dozens of rings and might have owned hundreds of them, were it not for his incurable habit of giving them away to women—preferably Northern women with wheat-colored hair, deep bosoms, and blue eyes. Deciding in favor of the ruby, he slipped it ceremonially over the polished nail of his right index finger, and pressed it down to the knuckle. With a perfume atomizer he sprayed his de Reszke beard, adjusted his gold-embroidered hat to the precise slant of the Vesuvio’s smokestacks, then surveyed the effect—front, back, and profile—in a three-paneled, full-length mirror. Where others would have seen merely a handsome dandy, Captain Orselli saw the truer reflection of a Renaissance magnifico smiling back at him ironically from the glass.
The Captain nipped an English-market cigar between his fine teeth and went on deck. The night was moonless, clear; acid stars etched brilliant geometric patterns in the heavens. Orselli glanced at the sea and sky—a mariner’s glance that established the position of the Vesuvio almost as accurately as a sextant and chronometer. By Polaris and Bootes the Captain knew that his ship was traveling on the northwesterly Atlantic course assigned to full-powered steamers, and that Cape St. Vincent, the southwesternmost jut of Europe, must be fading somewhere off his starboard beam. Two and one-half days out from Naples, the Vesuvio had traversed the Mediterranean, slipped through Gibraltar, and, Boston-bound, was now approximately fifty miles out on the Great Circle of the Atlantic.
Clustered electric lights, spraying downward from the midship rail, illuminated the large Italian flags painted on either side of the vessel—royal notice to U-boats that the Vesuvio was the property of a neutral nation. Privately, Captain Orselli expected no danger from submarines. In April, 1915, with Germany urging Italy to line up with the Central Powers against France and England, U-boat commanders were being tenderly respectful to Italian vessels. No such respect could be guaranteed, however, from the ran
dom mines swirling about in this part of the ocean. Yesterday the British auxiliary Frobisher had struck a mine; the day before, a French destroyer had gone down. Because there simply was no insurance against these spiky, drifting terrors—you could hit one at eight or eighteen knots—Captain Orselli’s standing order was “Continue speed.”
At twenty knots the Vesuvio plowed through the North Atlantic.
On the bridge, darkened save for a gleam from the compass binnacle, a small company of saloon passengers was gathered; the Captain himself had selected them for reasons balanced somewhere between policy and pleasure. First in the Captain’s interest was the Swedish-American mezzo-soprano with the Brünnhilde bosom and pale-gold Psyche knot worn low at the nape of her neck. Professionally known as Erna Thirklind, she was, according to the steamship’s publicity department, returning to her native America after wild scenes of acclamation at Milan, Rome, and Naples. Captain Orselli doubted the acclamation story, but was finding other interesting aspects to Erna Thirklind’s character and accomplishments. Bending over her hand, he addressed her now as “Diva,” and was not in the least perturbed by her temperate response. Gaetano Orselli was a man of patience.
Next to be greeted was Cornelius J. Deegan, occupant, with his wife and retinue, of the Ildefonso Suite on A deck. Mr. Deegan, whose fortunate brick and gravel contracts with the city of Boston had made him a millionaire, was returning from Rome, where he had recently been inducted into papal knighthood because of his generous interest in restoring the Irish abbey of Tullymara. The redness of brick dust was in the Knight’s hair at sixty, and the hardness of brick was still in his freckly hands. Sir Cornelius was accompanied by his wife, Agnes, a grayish woman of no importance to anyone except her husband, her seven children, some fifteen assorted Catholic charities, and a hundred or more poor relatives.
Captain Orselli conveyed to the Deegans just that measure of indifference which a famous portrait painter might bestow on a couple of bourgeois sitters. And to the Reverend Stephen Fermoyle, the sparely built young priest in the Deegan entourage—newly ordained, by the austere look of him—the Captain gave that special inclination of the head which no Catholic, however anticlerical, can withhold from the priesthood.
To the others on the bridge—an attaché of the Italian embassy and his handsome wife, a British banker seeking a fresh Admiralty loan in New York, and a Chicago specialist in canon law who was getting strictly nowhere with the Rota in an annulment case—Captain Orselli made salutations. Then with a brief explanation of celestial mechanics, he began to point out the stars that for centuries had been the guides and familiars of men.
Orselli’s interest, like that of any transatlantic navigator, lay to the north. “Regard the Bear,” he said, pointing to the great constellation that blazed like a crystal bonfire overhead. “It pivots around the North Star, as if the Bear were being whirled about by its tail. At the tip of the Bear’s nose you see Algol, beloved of camel drivers. And those golden streamers between the Bear and the Plow are known to poets as ‘Berenice’s Hair.’ Yes, a woman’s tresses beautify even the heavens. Shall I tell you how it came about, this myth of much charm?”
To the passengers gathered on the darkened bridge, Captain Orselli’s dandyish index finger, scented beard, and lyric vocabulary were as bewildering as the stars he was pointing out. The type was new to most of them. That the commander of a 25,000-ton vessel should drive his ship at full speed through mine-strewn waters, yet find time to oil his beard and discourse poetically on the stars, was completely baffling, for instance, to Mr. Cornelius Deegan. Long before his induction as Knight Commander of the Order of St. Sylvester, Mr. Deegan had been a pillar of morality. He struck the moral note now, in muttered undertones to his wife.
“I don’t like it, Agnes. With all those U-boats prowling around outside, this fellow ought to be tending more to business.”
Aware but contemptuous of the Hibernian’s disapproval, Captain Orselli continued to drive his ship at twenty knots and to rub up the rest of his audience with the oiled pumice of his charm. He struck his poet-navigator stance and strummed dolce on his lyre. In telling this Berenice story, he had a message to convey. Everyone knew by now that he was a bold shipmaster, and his handsome shoulders suggested certain powers attractive to fully grown women. The Swedish-American soprano with the blonde Psyche bun felt these things as well as anyone else. Captain Orselli knew she felt them. But he wanted her to know also that wheat-colored hair excited him beyond the love of rubies, and that if he might enjoy the one, he would—if pressed—part with the other. Especially on a night of stars.
“Berenice was an Egyptian queen surpassing in beauty,” he began. The Captain would have preferred to work in Italian, but to show his virtuosity as a linguist, he spoke in English. “When her husband carried a dangerous expedition to Syria, Berenice cut off her golden hair”—Orselli’s wrist made a sickle motion suggestive of wheat shorn close to the root—“and laid it on the altar of Amen-Ra. Do such women exist today?” Shaking his notched beard with ever so slight a melancholy, Captain Orselli pointed at the constellation. “To reward such sacrifice, the god displays Coma Berenices in the sky. And that is for why [the idiom momentarily slipped away from him] navigators and lovers see on spring nights the glory of her tresses in the heavens.”
The reception was only fair. Cornelius Deegan grunted that it was getting chilly, and the American nightingale wrapped her boa higher around her throat. Long experience in treading his starlight stage had led Captain Orselli to expect a warmer hand. It occurred to him that he should have worn the emerald. He was about to launch into his Andromeda routine when a baritone voice inquired:
“Qual’ e Lucifero?” The question had edge, timing, and intent.
In the darkness Captain Orselli felt the attack. He could not see his questioner but he recognized the Roman accent—ecclesiastic, acquired. That would be the voice of the young priest in the Deegan suite. The Captain decided to have a little quiet fun with this bantling curate.
“Lucifer? The fallen angel? Why do you wish to locate him, Father?” The questions jockeyed a laugh from the audience. “You fear his fate?”
“I fear, you fear, we fear.” The voice in the darkness was good-natured, humorous. “No, Captain, I’m curious about Lucifer because, like his namesake, he travels under so many aliases.”
Captain Orselli liked both the temper and matter of the young priest’s presentation. A whipmaster himself, he enjoyed a punishing flick from another. “You are perfectly right, Father. The star has been known by many names—Lucifer, Phosphor, Hesperus. But they are always one and the same.” The Captain’s finger pointed to the western horizon. “And there it lies, dusky-red, fallen, but still proud.”
The ruby on Orselli’s index finger, catching the red glow of his cigar, duplicated the precise color of the planet.
“The oddest part of the story,” he continued, “is that this very star will rise from the sea tomorrow morning, blonde and golden, under the name of Venus. Is it not wonderful, this alchemy of the night?”
The question, a mixture of rhetoric and innuendo, neither required nor expected an answer. The stargazing party began to break up.
Captain Orselli moved among his guests, Thespian foot forward. The brush with the young priest had heightened his exhibitionistic mood. Pinked unexpectedly, Orselli covered the small hurt with Tuscan exaggerations of speech and gesture. His good-night bow to the Deegans was a mock obeisance, and his tone to Stephen was that of a champion swordsman congratulating a novice on a lucky thrust.
“Your wrist is supple, Father. You reached me nicely with your conjugation of timeo: I fear, you fear, we all fear. Ha! How true! Pride, captain of the capital sins, is ever the undoing of the great ones. ‘That last infirmity of noble minds,’ as your Milton says. Or do I misquote?” He turned solemnly to Cornelius Deegan. “We must speak by the book here, else we are ruined.”
The Knight’s honest and utter confusion tempted Orselli beyon
d bounds of courtesy. “Shall we continue in my cabin, Father? Tuscan honor demands satisfaction, and the stars say it is yet early. Your friends will not mind?”
Agnes Deegan felt heat waves radiating from her husband’s neck. That danger signal she knew well. It meant that Sir Corny was doubling his freckled fist and in another moment would be throwing his applesauce punch at the Captain’s fine medieval nose.
“Go with him, Stephen,” she said. “Cornelius and I are tired, anyway. We’ll be going to bed.” Her eyes considered the heavens, as though she had never seen them till now. “Ah! ’Tis a beautiful night for an argument.”
Stephen hesitated. The flattery of Orselli’s invitation was not lost upon him, and he longed for a tussle at close quarters with this arrogant dandy. But the slight to the Deegans was inexcusable. The young priest must make a choice; he would either surrender to the charm of this worldly, fascinating man or declare his deeper loyalty to Corny and Agnes Deegan. Much as he wished to know Orselli, Stephen declared for the stronger loyalty.
“I’m afraid you’d have a drowsy opponent tonight, Captain. I couldn’t risk being cut to ribbons in my sleep. Will you make it another time?”
Out of the tail of his eye, Orselli saw the British banker making up to Erna Thirklind. The danger from the English quarter outweighed the two rebuffs that this independent young priest had given him. He lifted his gold-embroidered hat. “At any time, Father. But the voyage is short, remember. We have only seven more days to grapple for each other’s soul.” He exposed his handsome teeth to the Deegans. “A domani”
“A domani” said Stephen, wondering, as he strolled toward the Deegan suite on A deck, When and where have I ever met such a thoroughgoing and magnetic rascal?
THE DEEGAN SUITE was a baroque version of the luxury expected by Americans on an Italian liner in the second decade of the present century. Much-tapestried and ornately gilded, it befitted the new-made Knight of St. Sylvester as he sat down on a rococo armchair, hoisted his feet (large feet that had climbed many a ladder, with many a hod of cement) onto a spindly taboret, and delivered himself of strong feelings about Captain Orselli.